“Yes,” Greg says. “Why am I different? Why did those things happen to me?”
“We don’t know. Your brain waves were always different. Up until a few years ago, flatline was considered to be the deepest form of a coma. After all, if one is brain-dead, how much further could one go? But there was something beyond that. Something more. In the deepest comas, beyond the flatline, there are electrical waves called Nu-complexes. They originate in the hippocampus, which is the center for emotion and memory. And that’s where you were, Mr. Hughes. The deepest state.”
“Emotion and memory,” Greg says.
“Yes,” Dr. Hester says. “And you pulled someone there with you. So much so that your Nu-complexes began to sync up. Began to mirror each other. It was something so… astonishing that we pulled you out of Amorea and put you back in, just to see what would happen. You were a blank slate for only a short amount of time while the rest of Amorea remained on hold. But when we put you back in, when you became plugged back in to Amorea, you synced up again with him. Almost immediately.”
“Sean,” Mike says. “Sean.”
Dr. Hester smiles. It carries with it a melancholic curve. “Sean Mellgard. Or Nathan Powell, as he’s known in the real world.” The smile fades. “Drug addict. Heroin was his choice du jour, or so I’m told. Got hooked at age fourteen. Overdosed at nineteen. They found him choked almost to death on his own vomit in his car, parked under an overpass in Detroit. By the time they got to him, the oxygen to his brain had been cut off for upward of seven minutes. That and the combination of drugs in his system led to his nervous system shutting down.”
“He gets migraines,” Mike whispers, because he doesn’t know what else to say. “They hurt.”
“We know,” Dr. King says, not unkindly. “We think it’s his body’s way of still fighting addiction, even after all this time. Which is why Dr. Hester introduced the Ercaf to Amorea for him to take. Ercaf was a popular migraine medication beginning early in the 1950s. He wanted to make sure the experience was… authentic.” She says this last with a
trace of scorn, but Dr. Hester either doesn’t hear it or chooses to ignore it.
“The Nu-complexes began to move in sync with each other. We’d never seen anything like it before. For all intents and purposes, Mr. Powell—Sean—was brain-dead, with the barest blips of alpha waves. But from the moment you were sent to Amorea, that began to change.” He sounds excited. He’s practically vibrating from it. Mike and Greg are sickened by the sight of him. “You were the last person we introduced into the environment. Not because of anything mundane like lack of funding, no. We’d felt we’d achieved the exact number needed to have Amorea become a thriving town on its own, with as little interference from us as possible. But then you came.”
He cocks his head at them. “Tell me, Mr. Hughes. Mr. Frazier. What is so different about you than everyone else?”
“Nothing,” Greg says.
“None of this is real,” Mike says. “You’re lying. None of this is real. None of this is—”
“You remembered, didn’t you?” Dr. Hester says. “While you were in Amorea. You remembered things about being Greg Hughes.”
“Yes,” Greg says.
“Not real,” Mike chants. “Not real. Not real.”
Greg thinks, Let me.
Mike thinks, It hurts. Oh my god, it hurts. I just want to go home.
Greg thinks, I know.
“We thought you did,” Dr. King says. “It was… surprising, to say the least.” She glares at Dr. Hester before continuing. “We thought that your real persona was breaking through your Amorea life at first. And maybe that wasn’t too far off the mark. It took us longer than it should have to realize what was actually going on.”
“I was waking up,” Greg says. “I was coming out of the coma.”
“Yes,” Dr. Hester says. “I don’t use the word miracle, Mr. Hughes. Ever. Modern science has no place for miracles. But here you are, as close to one as I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime. And I think it was because of the deep coma. The syncing of your brain waves with Sean Mellgard’s.”
“I love him,” Mike says. “I’m supposed to tell him that. Tomorrow. Or whenever tomorrow was.”
There’s a look exchanged between the doctors, one that neither Greg or Mike can sort out. There’s surprise and fear and shock, and on Dr. Hester, something that’s akin to greed.
“Was this… reciprocated?” Dr. King asks slowly.
I would do it again.
What?
All of this. To get here. If I had to, I’d do it all over again.
Lucky for you, big guy, you won’t have to. I don’t know if you know this, but you’re kinda stuck with me now.
But it’s Greg who answers, because even he can feel it. “Yes.”